After the British parliamentary expenses scandal Boris Johnson had this great article on Monday – (click the link to ‘MPs’ expenses in pictures’ for the more bizarre things UK taxpayers cough up for).

Boris said MPs should be forced to read every line of every law they vote on. But with government so big, is this possible? I asked some IPA researchers to calculate how long it would take to read all the legislation currently in the federal parliament.

5 weeks! And that’s reading non-stop for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This is enough to drive you to drink. But if you live in Oldham in the UK you’ll now have to queue behind rope barriers to get a beer (and you can’t buy a round for your mates either). Don’t laugh – it’s about to happen here too.

What would the great essayist HL Mencken have made of this? His lines include “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” and “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Here is Mencken in his own words in 1948.

Last Friday the IPA’s Alan Moran told the Senate what the ETS would do to the Australian economy (see page 25).

Not much if you live in Melbourne’s City of Port Phillip. Last week a man was convicted and fined $52,500 for demolishing his semi-detached unit without a permit.

This morning we sent the IPA’s Chris Murn to take a photo of the rubble.

If he had applied for a permit, the council wouldn’t have allowed its demolition anyway because they declared the mundane-looking unit had ‘heritage’ status (it was built in the 1940s by the Housing Commission).

When the government tells you what you can’t do with your own property, they as good as confiscate it. Just because this sort of thing happens all the time doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get angry when it does. (If Port Phillip Council thought this house was so special they could have just bought it!)

The Mayor was positively joyful at the conviction: “Saddle up your horse and ride out of town now if you think you can get away with it”.

Politicians intimidating the public doesn’t only happen in Australia. Read this letter from Congressman Barney Frank that’s just been released trying to tell someone what they can and can’t say about government policy.

And did you see what happened to Arnie yesterday? Californian voters rejected his proposal to raise taxes. Instead Arnie is going to have to cut costs (what a radical idea!) The only law that was passed was one prohibiting politicians getting pay rises when the budget was in deficit.

The IPA was the first to tell you the Rudd government was ‘Whitlamesque’. Some of you wrote back to me saying – DON’T BE RIDICULOUS! But look at the ‘Underlying cash balance’ (ie deficit/surplus) column of table 1 in this budget paper from Tuesday night.

We’re relying on Treasury forecasts of more than 4% GDP growth to get us out of this deficit. But why should we believe Treasury? After all a year ago Treasury predicted in 2009-10:

economic growth would be 3% (it is actually minus .5%)

employment growth would be 1.25% (it is actually minus 1.5%)

there’d be a surplus of $19 billion (there’s actually a deficit of $58 billion).

In his budget speech on Tuesday Wayne Swan said “our public finances are among the strongest in the developed world.” Well – he would say that wouldn’t he? The boss of Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz said in March last year “Bear Stearns’ balance sheet, liquidity, and capital remain strong.” A few days later his company went broke…

In The Australian last Friday, Alan Wood talked about why the IPA is the only organisation willing to speak out on the economic consequences of the emissions trading scheme. (My original piece in the Australian Financial Review is here.)

Yet according to the IPA’s Julie Novak revenue to state governments will increase by 6%.

So where’s the money coming from? Kevin Rudd’s borrowing it – so he can bail out state Labor governments. The story made the front page of The Australian on Monday following the release of this IPA report.